大きな明るいショーウィンドウ

In the autumn of 1912 August Macke went to Cologne with his friend the painter Franz Marc to see a travelling show of the Italian Futurists, who painted speed and light as if the modern city were coming apart at the seams. You can watch that visit soak into this canvas. A well-dressed woman in a long blue dress stops at a shop window, perfectly still, while everything around her, the glass, the reflections, the lamplight, splinters into bright wedges of colour and seems to slide past her. Macke was working in the Rhineland, folding what he had taken from the French, the Fauves, and now these Italians into his own bright, orderly delight in the street. He was 25 when he painted it. Two years later he was dead, killed in the first months of the First World War.